Bolu, Türkiye
Plenary Speakers
Steve Ormerod
Water Research Institute, Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom
Steve Ormerod is Professor of Ecology at Cardiff University where he has studied and worked for 45 years. His research addresses the effects of global change on river ecosystems using empirical and experimental approaches over a large range of scales and involving a wide range of organisms. Alongside his research, governance roles with learned societies, research institutes, environmental NGOs, regulatory bodies and government bodies have brought direct involvement in the application of freshwater and ecological sciences to environmental problems.
Plenary Title:
Pattern, process and purpose: Freshwater science and the plight of freshwater ecosystems
Abstract:
The growing global plight of freshwater ecosystems has brought explicit recognition of the importance of inland waters through the UN Global Biodiversity Framework. Simultaneously, recent decades have seen a progressive shift in the activities of freshwater scientists from fundamental research towards the need to understand and address the many stressors that now affect freshwater ecosystems. This brings challenges, however, because of the large- and long-term nature of the problems we must address.
In this contribution, I reflect on four decades of research into global change pressures on fresh waters ranging across pollution, climate change and intensifying land use. I draw to attention to the importance of combining process studies, experiments at varying scales, big data and models to enhance understanding and underpin action. Collaboration across disciplines, sectors and nations offer some of our greatest hopes for safeguarding freshwater ecosystems and their biodiversity for future generations.
Maria Teresa Ferreira
School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Maria Teresa Ferreira is Full Professor at the School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon. She is currently the Head of the Science Council and the Coordinator of the Associated Laboratory Sustainable Land Use and Ecosystem Services. She has a biologist background and a PhD in Forest Engineering and Natural Resources Management. She works on freshwater ecology and management, with special interest on ecological quality, fish communities and riparian ecology. She was responsible for a MSc in Management and Conservation of Natural Resources and an international PhD on River Restoration and Management. She supervised 23 PhD theses and currently supervises 6 more. Teresa developed research activities in 60 national and 10 European competitive projects and was involved in an identical number of applied studies (ecohydraulics, ecological monitoring, river restoration, water management). She published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and presented over 500 oral communications and key-notes. She is a member of the National Water Council, of the Science Council of the Portuguese Science Foundation, of the Science Council of INRAE (France). She regularly acts as advisor for water management and agriculture affairs.
Plenary Title:
Restoration Needs and Challenges in European Rivers: A Bird's-Eye Perspective
Abstract:
Since its inception in the early 2000s, the Water Framework Directive has outlined ambitious goals for improving freshwater ecosystems across Europe. These goals are benchmarked against least-disturbed conditions and rooted in the natural ecological processes and interactions between biological communities and their abiotic drivers. Over the past 20 years, efforts have been made to create a unified approach across member states to characterize biological communities, assess abiotic conditions, monitor relevant indicators, and identify sources of disturbance.
Despite these efforts, indicators for target species and habitats continue to reveal a progressive decline. Empirical and predictive trends show only modest improvements in ecological quality across Europe. A key factor behind this limited progress is the failure to adopt a comprehensive riverscape perspective for river restoration. River connectivity improvement in its different dimensions is at its infancy. Additionally, the inability to effectively address socio-ecological systems and human-driven pressures hampers the restoration of ecological processes, making it rare to achieve meaningful restoration at scale despite continuous efforts.
The limited capacity of many socio-ecological systems to revert to natural conditions must be factored into quality objectives. Mitigating the impact of human activities should go hand in hand with restoration initiatives to drive transformative changes in landscapes and human behavior. Only by addressing these challenges holistically can significant and lasting improvements in freshwater ecosystems be achieved.
HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, Hungary
Zsófia Horváth is a community ecologist, especially interested in the spatial structuring and landscape-level drivers of biodiversity. Most of her work comes from small aquatic habitats, ponds, where she studies the role of connectivity in sustaining aquatic biodiversity. She is also interested in the role of secondary habitats and how such habitat networks work in the urban environment. She is currently working at the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary, where her research group is active in empirical and experimental work on metacommunities and they run a citizen science program on urban ponds.
Plenary Title:
Urban ponds and where to find (and sample) them: using citizen science to survey urban biodiversity
Abstract:
Globally increasing urbanisation results in rapid environmental changes, including the disappearance and fragmentation of natural habitats. At the same time, urban citizens create green spaces and aquatic habitats for recreational purposes in gardens and city parks. The resulting anthropogenic aquatic habitats such as urban ponds are increasingly considered valuable for biodiversity, but at the same time, systematic large-scale studies that address the ecological role of these secondary habitats are still scarce. Among urban ponds, small garden ponds have been especially neglected, even though they are expected to be the most numerous representatives of urban aquatic habitats. In my talk, I will explore the so-far hidden potential of urban (public and garden) ponds in contributing to urban biodiversity and how we can explore this with the help of citizen science.
Vesela Evtimova
Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
Vesela Evtimova is an Associate Professor with the Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where she has been working since 2003. She was awarded a PhD in Freshwater Ecology by Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, in 2013. Between 2006 and 2007, she served as a trainee with the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at the Joint Research Centre DG of the European Commission, Italy. Her research primarily focuses on European lake, river, and groundwater invertebrates, as well as the ecological processes within these environments, including in (sub)Arctic and Antarctic regions. Additionally, she investigates the impacts of global environmental changes and major disturbances, such as climate change, hydrological pressures, the introduction of invasive alien species, and nutrient loading. To address these challenges, she employs a combination of experimental and observational approaches.
Plenary Title:
Hydrological stress: how and are aquatic invertebrates and ecosystems coping?
Abstract:
In the age of the so-called Anthropocene, natural hydrological regimes are often modified by numerous factors. In turn, such changes may cause deterioration of habitats, fragmentation of the physical environment, shore instability, decline of food resources or even facilitate degradation of ecosystem integrity and affect various levels of community organisation in aquatic and nearby terrestrial ecosystems. Owing to the projected increase of frequency and magnitude of extreme climatic events, freshwater ecosystems, already damaged by the overuse of water, stand to be affected even further by global changes. This explicates the increased research effort on the responses of aquatic systems to hydrological stress from the second half of the 20th century and even more so over the last decades, the output of which efforts I will briefly review during my talk. I will also present some case studies on the relationships among hydrological regimes/stress, aquatic habitats and invertebrate biota. We will see examples of tools we could employ to better understand the acting mechanisms.
Antonio Camacho
University of Valencia, Spain
Antonio Camacho (PhD) is the Director of the Limnology research group at the Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, and Full Professor of Ecology at the University of Valencia (Spain). His research is focused in aquatic ecosystems, global change, and limnology, both on structural and, above all, functional aspects. Specialist in functional ecology of lakes and wetlands, he is interested in the microbial ecology and biogeochemical cycles in inland waters and, particularly, in the interactions between aquatic microorganisms and their role in the carbon cycle and the relationship of these processes with change climate. In addition to basic research, which is reflected in more than 200 scientific publications, he has also carried out a high number of applied and transfer research works. He made research stays in the USA, France, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Costa Rica, Australia and Mexico, among others, and has been six times the expedition leader in field research campaigns in Antarctica. He co-led in Spain the technical process for the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive and the Habitats Directive for lakes and wetlands and participated in the elaboration of the wetlands supplement of the IPCC. From 2010 to 2018 he chaired the Iberian Association of Limnology (AIL). Likewise, from 2014 to 2020, he was the Head of the Division of Environmental Sciences of the European Academy of Sciences. Also, from 2018 to 2023, he has been the Chairperson of the European Federation of Freshwater Sciences (EFFS).
Plenary Title:
Wetlands, our climate allies, and vice-versa?
Abstract:
Wetlands are strongly active ecosystems from the biogeochemical point of view as the permanent or temporary presence of water allows intense biological processes. Among the biogeochemical processes, carbon fixation and respiration, the later both by aerobic and anaerobic processes, generate fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHG) between wetlands and the atmosphere, thus determining the carbon balances (C-sequestration/releasing) and fluxes of GHG from/to the atmosphere. Originally, and depending on their nature, diverse types of wetlands display different balances, which are mediated by their own ecological features and their interplay with catchment processes, also including groundwater. The rates of these processes may follow a seasonal pattern, since these processes are very much dependent on the temperature and the hydrological conditions. Further, when the natural ecological features are altered, shifts in both the patterns and the processes’ rates may occur, usually worsening the climate change regulating service of wetlands. These changes can be better understood by using complementary –omic approaches. Specific active restoration actions, both in the catchment and the wetland itself, can help to recover the natural conditions that emphasize the GHG emissions abatement in wetlands, thus enhancing this ecosystem service. Moreover, the biogeochemical role of wetlands is likely to change under different climate scenarios, which can be modelled to forecast how they could behave in the future. In this talk I shall use this framework to offer an integrative view on how humans and our behaviour towards wetlands (e.g., conservation, restoration) and climate change (e.g. decarbonisation of the economy) can convert these ecosystems in our climate allies.